Summit DD

Summit DD is the primary community force to ensure people with developmental disabilities receive the highest quality of services and supports; that our communities are ones which support and embrace every individual, regardless of disability; and that each eligible person is provided the opportunity to achieve his/her full potential.

Summit County Developmental Disabilities Board approached Go Media for help with their brand and website. Their website in particular was a sprawling and complicated site that had been slowly added to over the years by many different parties. The site contained tons of duplicate content, had a navigation that did not intuitively organize the information, and had no clear starting point. Additionally, the site held content directed to two distinct audiences; the parents (90% of the users) and service providers (10% of the users). The result was families in need that could not find the information they desperately needed.

We began our redesign process by identifying Summit DD’s goals and challenges. We then went through the entire site documenting and cleaning all of the existing content. We created a new information architecture, eliminated duplicate content, ‘chunked’ the content into bite-sized pieces, and developed a new client experience. We built robust landing pages and color based visual cues for each section. We also added clarity by removing secondary audience content from the main website and moved it to it’s own micro-site.

As part of our process we build a live wireframe of the new website structure. This gives our clients the opportunity to click through a live version of what their website will be (in terms of layout and content structure – imagine an interactive blueprint) before we get into the visual designs. We knew we were doing a great job when the client told us that we could launch our wireframe as-is and it would be a huge improvement over their current site.

One of the greatest challenges presented by Summit DD was that families have a very hard time ‘knowing where to start’. Our solution was a fun interactive Quick Start Guide that we described as a Candy-Land like road map that travels from birth to death. Along that road is hand selected information, articles and videos specific to each age range of the client. Parents now had the most relevant content at their fingertips.

The finished site also includes a staff and board section, site wide language translator, dynamic animated historical timeline, news, blog, newsletter sign-up, and interactive calendar of events with full calendar view, list view and events details pages. Through these functionality upgrades and redesign we boosted first time visitors on the site by over 300%.

We ended up developing additional brand concepts for exploration sake along with the refinement process. Below you see actual samples of the proofs presented to the client during the design process. This approach by multiple concepts is emblematic of Go Media’s Design process.